Vancouver Island University has been a part of Nanaimo for many years, in one form or another.
The post-secondary institution located at Fifth Street and Wakesiah Avenue opened for business as Malaspina College in 1969 at the old Nanaimo hospital site on Kennedy Street, a two-year university transfer institution, but in a sense, it set its roots much earlier.
The university, known for trades training and vocational education in Nanaimo, started up in 1936 when Jack Macready, a garage owner, began teaching mechanics from his shed. Macready relocated to a location at Machleary and Campbell streets in February of 1938, and was joined by Daniel B. Egdell, who taught building construction. The building was christened Dominion-Provincial Youth Training Centre.
“In [1971], Malaspina College, which was an academic university transfer institution melded, and that’s the term that was used, with the vocational school, and it all became Malaspina College,” says Helen Brown, retired VIU history professor. “So now there were, if you will, two parts to Malaspina: the vocational and the academic.”
The university has taken part in a number of innovative initiatives, including waiving tuition for people aging out of the foster care program, and that has been a long-standing tradition, according to Brown.
“This was a whole new invention … what was invented here in British Columbia, this system of a university transfer, it was definitely innovative and extremely important when you think about what B.C. is like,” said Brown. “If you live away from where there’s a university, it’s really hard to go away and start university, but this gave so much opportunity to young people across the province.”
It wasn’t just young people either, as Brown said there weren’t entrance requirements back then, so there were a lot of mature students who were able to get university credits. The whole idea and way it worked was new and it was unique in Canada at the time.
Christine Meutzner, Nanaimo Community Archives manager, who attended VIU, says it is like an architectural time warp.
“If you want to see architecture for the last, say 40 years, evolution of institutional architecture, you can trot on up there because there’s something from every period and certainly the initial buildings had a little bit of a temporary look and now, they look much more permanent in my mind, but generally speaking it’s a little history of the last 40 years of institutional architecture, for sure,” said Meutzner.
The school changed its name to Malaspina University-College in 1988 and then to Vancouver Island University in April 2008.
